SEO’s Need To Adapt Or Die

Companies have an unlimited budget for items that give them a positive return. Even in a recession this is true.

Unfortunately for SEO’s (Search Engine Optimization Experts) companies are considering their work one of these unmeasurable and many of theme are now out of work.

About everyone I know who attended (and was not a incisive media employee) was talking about how the SEO flag ship conference, SES San Jose, was completely dead… and everyone is blaming the recession. I concur the recession has hit the SEO industry very hard. In a recession people go into survival mode and if they cant easily justify the spend then they cut it.

Lately it seems like SEO companies have had to learn to adapt or die. SEO client work not only sucks but it does not scale and its definitely not stable.

Also there is no magic secret sauce to SEO anymore. Its pretty obvious how to get your site to the top of Google and people are making great products available to these businesses for a fraction of the cost.

Check out how the smart SEO’s are adapting:

Stephan Spencer – Stephan is a ninja when it comes to SEO but he has also embraced social media and creating super viral content. A bit ago we did a contest to design my business card. This contest was orchestrated by Stephan Spencers company Netconcepts. The contest generated a huge amount of buzz online and tons of links for his client overnightprints.com.

Aaron Wall – In addition to writing one of the best selling books on SEO, Aaron has a EXCELLENT paid forum. I wonder if Aaron takes client work anymore =P.

David Naylor – One of my best friends in the industry Dave is always constantly evolving. He owns a very large ISP in England and is also involved in many new cool products like firewall script.

Neil Patel After seeing their was no future in SEO Neil sold his SEO company and started making more service oriented companies like crazyegg.com and the about to be unveiled kissmetrics.com

Patrick Gavin – Patrick was one of the first old school SEO’s to turn entrepreneur and start his own company – Text link Ads, maybe you have heard of it ? Patrick is now about to launch his new product Do It Yourself SEO. I have a feeling Patricks new service is going to put a bunch more SEO’s out of business but we will see when it launches.

Well I could go on for ever but the pattern is pretty clear. I am not going to go into the whole SEO is bullshit or seo is dead… the facts speak for themselves.

SEO Agencies providing client work are a dying breed. Especially when any monkey can have wordpress or any other CMS system up and running in 5 minutes and totally SEO’d as much as needed.

Noticed a trend it what dominates most search results lately? Wikipedia and wordpress blogs. How many SEO’s do you think they hired ? =P

Comments 116

a bit of different opinion here.
I think if wordpress is dominating along with Wikipedia. people will go out with wordpress and then again an SEO war between wordpress base sites.i agree SEOs will have to work more towards content and real value instead of relying on tricks. search engines are working everyday to make sure SEOs tricks don’t work any more but good content.

With the huge increase in the search engine with wordpress blogs and wikipedias on the results do you think there’s ever gonna be a time where there’s too many blogs getting high search results and google “slapping” them and thinking they’re not relevant anymore??
But at the same time it is easier for someone like myself to help my search rankings with just a blog and not hiring a team of seos

domainpubberSeptember 3, 2009

Great post Jeremy. Isn’t SEO really just one part of online promotion? I never got why agencies would want to bill themselves as strictly an SEO provider in the first place…

– I Doubt you will publish it.
– You are too big to be shout at, am I right?
– Great way to pay back your friends creating this post.
– Why have you not added a followed link to SES San Jose, you don’t like them.
– Why don’t you give nofollow links to your friends, you know SEO works.

Your post has some merit to what you say. With regards to the SEO jobless aspect. I will say that you have to have someone that is constantly reading up on what is new in the organic SEO industry. If you don’t you will lose your position that is a guarantee. SEO is about information and staying up to date. It is a full time job and if you don’t have someone doing it for you on top of all the other things that a business owner has to do then trust me you will lose BIG TIME!

As a design studio I laugh when I get contacted or when a client is contact by some goon with a gmail account that thinks they know more about SEO then we do. Semantic HTML? Valid Strict HTML? Advertising where it makes sense? These guys don’t know anything about this stuff and I agree that many of them will be going out of business. Good riddance! They made us all look bad. True professionals will continue to excel. Our business has been up even in the recession because our projects already get good results with the Search Engines…. oh well. Rant over..

Brad, at the moment I can increase hotel chain turnover 52% up via website (real case, no charlatan words), while market is 12% down in Spain this year doing what you could call ‘dead SEO’, do you honestly think my customer gives a damn how we call that? i$n’t it real value?

1. That any monkey wants to worry about installing WordPress or any other CMS and keep it up to date.

2. That any monkey wants to generate content and understands how to properly link through to their posts or redirect link bait and so on.

In my experience, most clients don’t and won’t want to get technical. They’d rather pay for it once they can afford it. Those are the clients we choose to work with. The do-it-yourselfer is nothing but trouble and I wouldn’t want to work with them anyway so they are free to go on their own.

I come from the design and advertising field. The same thing happened when the computer came in. Everyone thought that designers and advertisers were finished. They were not. People with good ideas were and are still valuable. Sure the industry changed but adapting for an SEO is second nature. It’s what we do.

Things will change and a cheap bastard will always try to do it on his own and opt for all these different readymade solutions. But a good business person knows when to hire out and when to focus on his core business. SEO will change no doubt. But people will have needs for SEO services for a long while to come. And I have full confidence that a hands on approach from a skilled SEO and good writers will trump any machine generated solution. Like all things in life, some people can afford the best and some shop at Wallmart. This industry has never been any different.

SEO is one of the few recession proof industries out there. It is true that SEO’s need to continually adapt to the changing online realities and the ones that don’t adapt will perish. However, nobody I know with any SEO talent is hurting for work :.)

You do continue to confuse the on-page elements of SEO (which have been getting less and less important over time) with holistic SEO (which encompasses the total picture).

DaveSeptember 3, 2009

SEO’s are kind of elitists too when it comes to marketing online. Too many .500 SEO’s like the guys that do the WMR show SEO 101. Charging $1k for submitting to some directories and doing some bookmarking doesn’t fly anymore.

I agree it is not hard to put up a WordPress blog and accomplish on-page SEO very quickly.

That is just one strategy however. I might add that that strategy is very 2005.

The best SEO clients are large companies who need aggressive back linking strategies, tons of content creation, dozens (not just 1 wordpress blog) and video. They also need all of those tactics and strategies to mesh well and be coordinated and executed in a lucid and logical manner.

The best SEOs are ones with in house content, in house video, in house designers and in house developers. They also have a policy of creating content, design and apps from an SEO requirement standpoint first.

As with most very competitive businesses the top tier will constantly evolve and the other 90% will be left to pick up the pieces or try to scrape up whatever business they can.

The more competition in there is in SEO, the more people are trying to rank in the top 10 spots. Once someone gets knocked off, they don’t sit back and relax, they either hire another SEO or fire their current one.

I agree with you too for the most part. It depends sometimes it seems with what you are targeting that a WP blog is not enough. However, some niches, especially local ones, is very easy to do just this and clients are happy. But we do need to evolve and link strategies constantly need to be reviewed.

MBSeptember 3, 2009

Though the news isn’t really new to those in the industry many will swear up and down that SEO doesn’t need an extreme makeover, advanced strategies, and publicly available accurate information.

The fault of so many SEO’s are their need to shill their own company, stroke their ego and peddle false information, which though damaging to themselves, is far more damaging to the industry as a whole.

It seems that those who have embraced change are willing to evolve and grow their skill set to hopefully return some consumer confidence to a market which is not as well respected as it was only a few years ago.

My best advice, if you own a blog, and you’re a serious SEO who cares about the industry, you should be expiring your old content so that when users arrive at your blog via a search engine they don’t see old, outdated and often times wrong information. It’s a widespread problem, and at its roots feels more like the leading individuals in SEO only care about their own traffic, rather than promoting change, and advancement in their peers.

Agree with you on this one. Even though companies still hiring “SEO” guys, but seems that the focus shifts. On smaller sites, people tend to do everything they can themselves as it is not a secret anymore and everybody knows that they need backlinks, text changes, etc. Its all over now.

both paid and natural search strategy are as important as ever. natural search is often the bigger channel with a better ROI. but at the same time seo best practices are built into most widely distributed platforms and application frameworks. decent copywriters and content producers are starting to understand search. managing the natural search channel has increasingly become just an everyday part of acquisition marketing.

as a previous full time in-house and contract SEO, i purposefully learned other tools and broadened my career path into more general web analytics. why would you want to be known as SEO when you could be a great acquisition marketer or web analyst that treats SEO as just one area of expertise.

you can also measure the return on seo and on social media. in this world you have to be able to prove your value.

If a SEO expert is adding value to the client then i don’t see any point in says that he will “die” professionally.

A search marketeer must deliver results. Those results are measurable. If a website doesn’t have increased traffic,quality visitors or good ranking at the serps do you think that the client will choose to work with him again?

I don’t think so

There are metrics analytics and people that rate a seo’s job.

Anyway i think this is another ” seo will die” post just to create buzz-linkbait

TimSeptember 3, 2009

Unmeasureable? Hmm…tell that to Yelp or Trulia or any other site that absolutely depends on SEO to drive its business. Yes, there are some things that can’t be quantified in SEO, very true. But that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. If anything, these big companies all say “We don’t do lead generation”. At least Trulia does I know. SEO services seems like easy money if the person purchasing them understands the value. Some people don’t. Oh well. Many do and that’s enough. NO service business scales well be it law, medicine, accounting, you name it. That’s just how it goes.

Let’s get this straight, SEO is so easy so everyone can do it, therefore professionals aren’t necessary? Does that mean everyone can be in the top 10, ranked #1? No of course not.

Actually your point proves that SEO has a ways to go and that the market has much more potential. You see, the reason that most websites can rank without that much effort is because most sites aren’t optimized, but as more sites become optimized and more hire SEO’s, the more necessary it becomes to hire an SEO. Right now, it is possible for a do-it-yourself guy to get decent rankings with little effort. When the industry matures, it won’t be so easy.

And not only that but the #1 spot gets on average 4x more clicks than the rest of the top 10 results, so having so-so organics are not so hot, and don’t even get me started on the long tail searches.

I think a company should consider SEO a long term strategy so that they can spare better amount it. And it should be consider as intangible asset rather then expense which can give back better good will and profits.

I agree completely about SEO’er s adapting. The entire web development business has been flooded with unprofessional part-timers that have not ability to support the service they are selling or even perform the service effectively. Great article.

Very interesting perspective. Out of curiosity, what would you suggest to the SEO expert who you’ve just now convinced?

TimSeptember 3, 2009

I’d say ask Kris Jones at PepperJam who Jeremy conveniently left out of his list. What would he say about selling SEO as a service? How many other SEO companies are on the Inc 500 list as well? And just look at all the agencies who do and are always hiring SEOs.

I think there is still a TON of work left for SEOs in terms of making their client’s sites SEO friendly. Really Google has set it up that you need to do basic white hat SEO just to get indexed. A lot of companies with websites don’t know the least about that. The funniest thing is when your typical IT or developer type will read something about old SEO tricks and f up their own site trying them. That’s more SEO work right there

Yes, there are changes coming and some already taking place. Factors that influence rankings may change. But what is most important about is summed up in one of your sentences. “I’m talking about SEO’s who help sites to abide by search engine policies and create and serve up clean, compelling, and relevant content.” The good SEO aren’t just interested in rankings. They are interested most in conversions and this is often the result of the content on a site.

Anyone who says SEO is extinct must be hiding in a cave waiting for the economy to rejuvenate. Those of us not hiding and continuing to fight know that, SEOs are busier than ever in this economy situation.

I kinda agree with Shoe for saying SEO is kinda dead in this bad economy time, mostly because it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of it. You could have hundreds of backlinks linking back to you and you still might not get into the first page of Google due to one reason or another (Google PR, etc). And on-page optimization could so easily be dealt with if you’re using WordPress (just use all the available plugins).

Well, I’m somewhat new to SEO but as The Underground Millionaire, I have been going hard at marketing since 2002. What I see is that the best results come from heavy PR marketing and article writing via paid PR releases. If you truly want millions of impressions and thousands of links, the game is the PPC game or the paid PR release game.

Well, interesting comments. I think that the SEO is not giong to go away for a long time at least in the next few years.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does not consist of a fixed process which when followed will result in the website ranking high in various search engines. This is because search engines are very versatile and do not share the actual recipe they follow while calculating website ranks for particular keywords.

Some people may contest that what I am describing here is not SEO, but that SEO is link building, changing title tags, code clean-up, etc.. I would strongly disagree. Those are simply the current SEO tactics. Like hundreds of other tactics, each of these may eventually disappear and be replaced by new tactics, but the practice of SEO will never die. As long as search engines are around—and they always will be—search engine optimization will be around.

In fact my thinking is, SEO is going to be crucial in the future to come. At the rate internet is growing SEO is going to be a top support service for internet based businesses as well as other websites.

As far as I think … not all the people have the same levels of skill and not everyone has the luxury to spend countless hours on internet..

Till the time last man standing is sitting in front of the PC optimizing his website or blog then there will always be a need of SEOs ….

With the internet explosion to get our hands on quality content we rely on Search Engines and as long as we use Search Engines as mean of finding that quality content we can’t ignore the fact that there will always be significant need of SEO … I Hope that makes some sense …

SEO as you seem to define it Jeremy, should have moved into the realm of web developers a long time ago. As you say, WordPress can be SEO’ed well by simply following Joost’s WordPress SEO guide.

There’s nothing tricky about good indexing, removing duplicate content and adding title tags.

However online marketing or even SEM is another ballgame. As the industry matures, the good agencies will excel in that direction. We work with clients looking to break into the Russian market – I can’t simply tell them to install WordPress 😉

I do hope for the day though when web developers can get the simple SEO stuff right and leave us to the more interesting marketing part. Maybe it’s this continual grind of sorting out basic issues that drives veteran SEOs to try other fields.

You’re absolutely right about this dying breed – although I feel sorry for the people who spent countless dollars paying for these services they could have done themselves with the right resources, like WordPress.

I’ve been thinking about converting to a WordPress blog for some time now. But I shutter at the thought of having to redo what took me seemingly forever to setup. I don’t know when I’ll have time to do this kind of overhaul. I’m sure I’m missing out on a great deal.

Say what ever you want, but SEO is still continuing to pay my mortgage, my lifestyle, and my hobbies. It’s also continually increasing my salary, and the price of the side contracts I have. All of my clients want to spend more money because it is so trackable. NO ONE should be unable to track ROI on their SEO campaign.

BartSeptember 4, 2009

Sure SEO pays you good, that is why you used your comment to drop a link to a site with adsense.

Opportunity exists in droves. Look around at the SEO disasters that exist in millions of corporate/business websites. They get horrible traffic and are losing revenue to competition.

There is a large segment of potential customers who do not have time, staff or any inclination to pursue DIYSEO. We all outsource things to people who do it better than we do. I try not to EVER do plumbing. SEO is no different. Yes, if you spend the time with WordPress, create a massive amount of SEO content and bone up on the best parctices, you do do well. But after investing all of that time, how will you have time to use Twitter!

As long as there are search engines, there will be SEO. Webmasters & companies will always be in competition to achieve those #1 rankings. As long as the search engines exist, it will be us SEO’s out there chasing our tails trying to figure it all out.

It’s funny you say “Also there is no magic secret sauce to SEO anymore.” Isn’t that the truth, yet you can visit one big corporate website to another and many still have not adopted good SEO. I even see poor SEO being used by corporations in highly competitive consumer markets. You’d think there would be plenty of work out there for SEOs.

I recall a poll that SeoMoz.org did a while ago where they plotted the average income and it was almost pitiful to learn that most SEO’s make around 40-55K. PPC managers are making more and able to do it with only half of the headaches. Not to mention it’s much easier to quantify the benefits of PPC than SEO. I was actually thinking about this last week and just happened to see that I’m not the only one who thinks SEO as a service isn’t the smartest business model there is.

You consider PPC better career option that SEO. Well PPC management according to you is only half the head ache. We work to satisfy ourselves. When I help a website reach the Top the feeling that happens to me is something different. It is the creative reason for which I am in the field. Money is important but job satisfaction is more than important.

Nice blog post. Yeah its true people have blog and some search about seo tips. You can get little and i think more the little tips which can really help you to improve you in seo. So why anyone need seo expert. I probably think famous brand needs because they didn’t much time and they have enough money. But a normal blogger or a website holder didn’t need an seo expert.

I feel that the term SEO has been over-hyped and that it is bound to eventually start floundering. Analyzing what you’re competitors are up to, and developing a strategy to counter & better their efforts is within the reach of most anybody with internet access and a bit of patience. That is why I like the DIY SEO idea so much.

My opinion is that many of these so called SEO experts need to link website stats directly back to sales for the business. It needs to be trackable and verifiable. When they can directly link the SEO work back to profits, they’ll have a customer for life.

Well SEO is all black magic to me. But WordPress seems to work. I set up a pet ferret blog a few months back and just let it sit with its “Hello World” default post. When, out of curiosity I typed ferrets as pets into google I was very surprised to find my site sitting at the top of page 2 with absolutely no content at all. I take it it’s because the name matched the search query.

SEO industry is feeling the heat. Earlier companies had unlimited funds to catapult them to the top of the search Rankings. Now these companies are bleeding. As a person who got involved and made some small fortunes with SEO as a freelancer I am also feeling the heat. The offers are hard to come by these days.
But this is one Industry that will find ways to reach the top again. I will wait until then

Well You are right. It is very difficult to spam these days. We are made to work very hard to build Links. But we are reaching the other side of the cycle already. The directories once were the final words of link building and they are completely ignored by Google. No follow tags are back in the contention of Google. So we are again coming back to the cycle.

It’s not the recession it’s the knowledge of the internet users. Many people have figured out the formula to getting high search engine rankings by either buying seo tutorials or reading blogs about seo. Seo services are going to be a thing of the past because of this new knowledge and the hefty price of their services.

I used to be a well paid SEO Consulant as no one likes doing th link building, got bored with it once I discovered worpdress, as you say wordpress plus a few plugins and your off and running, I’ve had some targeted wordpress websites rank in the top 5 for huge terms and sometimes even before the generic content is added.

I’ve seriously got to hurry up and make the switch to WordPress. Things are complicated enough, anything we can do to get better rankings is worth doing.
No matter how much things keep changing, adaptation is the only thing that’s going to keep any business from going under.

I have to disagree with you on this one. I think if an SEO company or person does great work and builds real value for the client they will be fine. The problem lies in that most SEO companies are overpriced and are delivering tremendous value to the client.

That is a crap article. There are so many things that must be taken into account for seo such as inbound linking, content development, stickiness, site tools, linkable content and so on… WordPress cannot do any of these things! SEO is more that must developing a site, its all of what I said and more…

Search engines generate nearly 90% of all Internet traffic and are responsible for 55% of all E-commerce transactions. Today, it is essential for all online businesses to make SEO an integral part of their online business strategy.

So I would like to recommend one of my client who helps you define, evolve and implement a powerful SEO strategy to leverage your online business potential

It’s interesting how each of these respected names see the future of SEO services and what they’ve done as a result of their views. I agree, SEO is like any other industry. Stay ahead of the curve or get left behind. While traditional SEO may be fading, some of the more desired, difficult & thus more valuable SEO components are alive & well (link building, seo analysis tools/platforms, content marketing, etc) – all where our company strives of course =).

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